Numbers

Depot celebrates the indigenous lettering of the railroads. Created in the prevalent style of the early Victorian age (when passenger rail travel came into being), these forms have appeared on boxcars, locomotives, and trolleys for most of their history. The wide proportion of these numbers may have helped counter the effects of foreshortening, making trains entering the station more easily identifiable by passengers on the platform. In creating the Depot typeface, we chiefly consulted our collection of enamel signs, using archival photographs and lettering diagrams to flesh out the font's character set.